Socially-Mediated Publicness (Essay Sample)

Socially-Mediated Publicness Name Institutions Socially-Mediated Publicness Socially mediated publicness is a term used to refer to the situation where technology reconfigures publicness, blurs the audiences and publics and distorts what it means to engage in public life (Baym & Boyd, 2012). All over the world people are using technology to communicate. Besides, the use of social media has gained popularity across the world. Social media is being used for social communication learning, teaching and, research. However, the increased use of social media has exposed many people and their activities to unwanted or unnecessary public scrutiny. Most of the social media have global audiences that are composed of different cultural, social, and religious background which is interconnected exposing one's public and social life. The social media thus creates an identity for users to interconnect with other groups of people. One of the differences that social media has to other contemporary media sources is the scale at which users can access information, share and interconnect with others. Furthermore, users have the ability to use this features on a daily basis. The degree of publicness is depended on the nature of social media site and affordance of social media. Unlike other media sources, social media creates publicness beyond one’s control. The ability to share information online or on any social media platform is part of socially- mediated publicness since shared information is easily shared across a wide range of users. The spread of information in social media is fast, sometimes instant depending on the choice of the user. As seen in Baym & Boyd (2012), navigating through socially mediated publicness is one of the most challenging tasks for many social media users. For instance, it is easy for some information such as videos to go viral garnering millions of views within minutes on social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook. In some cases, it is difficult for an individual to control such happenings especially when the information is damaging to their character. Managing such happenings requires attention from the affected person and administrators of social media (м–‘м„±мљ± & Yeonhee Rho, 2012). This process requires efforts from both social media users and the architects of these sites; hence this process requires both control and skills from both parts. Although what is posted online is not necessarily visible to the public, people may share content with other users. In cases where people want to achieve a certain number of views, sharing information creates an easy way to achieve publicness. To control unprecedented publicness, people must understand that by using social media sites, they are indirectly exposing themselves to the publicness (м–‘м„±мљ± & Yeonhee Rho, 2012). Thus people must learn ways to prevent their identities from unwanted exposure to the public. Although many social media sites have privacy settings that people can use to control their accounts, many are yet to utilize these features entirely. Baym & Boyd, (2012) argues that some of the control features for such people might include compelling them to choose whether to share information or not. Also, such people, they need both sensibility and experiences. For example over the six years, I have been using Facebook, I have learned a lot of privacy skills .I have learned how to make wise choices on what to share, when and who to share information. For many people, this process requires ...